We live, simultaneously, in two different worlds. Ultimately, we live in the World of Nature, a world that we did not create and the world upon which all life depends. Most immediately, we inhabit a "human world" that we create ourselves. Because our human world is the result of our own choices and actions, we can say, quite properly, that we live, most immediately, in a “political world.” In this blog, I hope to explore the interaction of these two worlds that we call home.

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Gary A. Patton

I was an elected official in Santa Cruz County, California for twenty years, from 1975 to 1995. Now, I am an environmental attorney, practicing law in Santa Cruz County. If you would like to contact me, send me an email at gapatton@mac.com.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2019

#71 / Not Even Past

David Brooks, the rather conservative "culture columnist" for The New York Times, has come out in favor of "reparations," by which Brooks means "the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences ... [something] more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about," says Brooks, "is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal."

Brooks references an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," published in The Atlantic in June 2014. Brooks didn't think much of that article when it first came out, he says, but Brooks now identifies himself as a "slow convert to the cause."

Other Democratic candidates for president don't seem to be in quite in the same position, or so it would appear. Ryan Lizza, writing in Esquire, suggests that a fight over reparations might tear the Democratic Party apart. Right-wing columnist George F. Will thinks so, too, and Will doesn't seem to be any too upset about that, either!

More than anything else, the stories I have been reading about reparations remind me of the statement attributed to William Faulkner, who is pictured above. "The past isn't dead," Faulkner is supposed to have said; "it isn't even past."

The system of human slavery upon which this nation was founded - and it was founded on that system - continues to impact us still. That is the point of the Coates' article, which is lengthy. It is the reason that Brooks has become a "slow convert" to a "national reckoning" with that past.

When the past "isn't even past," we need to confront that past as though it were a present reality.

Because it is. Both the roots and ramifications of slavery are still profoundly present today, and they affect us all.

Here's the thing about any and every present reality: we need to "reckon with it." That's what Brooks is talking about, and I think he's right.